Meeting on 2025-01-16 at 08:00 AEST

[carlhiggs]

Attendees: @healthysustainablecities/ghsci-software-working-group --- Alan, Carl (Chair), Erica, Eugen, Melanie, Rossano, Ryan Shirley

GHSCI Software Working Group

Our first meeting for 2025, we welcomed new team members @agrptec (Guadalajara, Mexico) and @rschifan (Turin, Italy) --- both bringing expertise in computer science and programming for urban analysis --- Welcome!

Also welcome was @MelanieLowe's prompt for us to clarify our focus. I believe in the subsequent discussion we agreed that broader than 'spatial and software', this group was really served as a:

Software working group for integration, analysis and reporting of policy and spatial indicators for healthy and sustainable cities

@eugenrb and others pointed out that other working groups (e.g. @healthysustainablecities/active-environments-network ) serve for development of new indicators.

The role of this group is their integration as usable working software for analysis and reporting, and in particular, supporting participation in the 1000 Cities Challenge of the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities.

News

We didn't discuss this in the meeting, but lets celebrate the publication of the paper describing the collaborative development of our software!

Higgs C, Lowe M, Giles-Corti B, Boeing G, Delclòs-Alió X, Puig-Ribera A, Adlakha D, Liu S, Borello Vargas JC, Castillo-Riquelme M, Jafari A, Molina-García J, Heikinheimo V, Queralt A, Cerin E, Resendiz E, Singh D, Rodriguez S, Suel E, Domínguez-Mallafré M, Ye Y, Alderton A. Global Healthy and Sustainable City Indicators: Collaborative development of an open science toolkit for calculating and reporting on urban indicators internationally. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. OnlineFirst (2 December 2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083241292102.

I also made some general updates to our software and underlying Docker image software stack last week, including improved feedback for users using YAML and background analysis in the GHSCI web app and updating to use OSMnx 2.0 (see releases)

Lets have sharing news a standing agenda item to start future meetings.

Priorities and standing agenda items

We discussed how we might loosely structure meetings, with standing agenda items representing priorities with persons aligned to take a leading role in reporting/contributing towards these. @EHinckson made the great suggestion of aligning these to time, with prioritised steps to achieve them (we can use Milestones to do this, let's discuss in next meetings):

User friendly processes

• @gboeing and @rschifan have both expressed interest in this aspect, along with @eugenrb and @carlhiggs
  • Carl will arrange a separate catch up for those interested to review existing approaches, and where these could go
• scope could include user interface design, online tool(s), refining configuration formats and processes, etc

Google Cloud Project / Google Earth Engine integration

• @ryn-trnr will lead prototyping and documentation of this project stream as an optional workflow
• Particular focus is on integrating and documenting indicator analysis and reporting for:
  • Global Urban Heat Vulnerability Index
  • Large Public Urban Green Space
• ideally, this workflow should be general enough to support new indicators of this 'type' (i.e. using Google Earth Engine etc)

Cycling indicators

• @shiqin-liu has capacity to take a leading role in implementing cycling related indicators into software
• In parallel to this, @ryn-trnr with @MelanieLowe have restarted a cycling indicators working group (aka @healthysustainablecities/active-environments-network ) to conceptualise new cycling indicators. It will be great to have coordination between Ryan and Shirley with this

Policy reporting

• @carlhiggs will take a lead on
  • updating support for the new policy checklist developed by @MelanieLowe
  • documenting the existing stand-alone policy report generation function
  • implementing this function in the web app

Enhanced reporting

• @eugenrb will coordinate with @carlhiggs to streamline generation of information required by the graphic designer for developing bespoke city scorecards.
  • Potentially, this task could later be further automated, but for now streamlining collation of the required information will make work easier for those involved.
• Once processes for analysing newly integrated indicators are integrated into the software and documented in the wiki, updates will be required for templates. @eugenrb and @carlhiggs can look to coordinate on design and implementation of these.

Other project streams

Contextual street walkability audits

@agrptec and @rschifan both have experience and expertise in computer vision, and @carlhiggs mentioned a project he was working on with colleagues Yang Ye, Keun Hee Lee and Alysha de Livera in 2023-24 to generalise methods developed by Yang for evaluating walkability in cold climate cities using street view imagery for other urban contexts using mixed data sources. Here is the paper published by Yang,

Ye, Yang, Chaozhi Jia, and Stephan Winter. 2024. "Measuring Perceived Walkability at the City Scale Using Open Data" Land 13, no. 2: 261. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13020261

For those interested, we engaged Keun to develop an approach for using street view imagery to conduct audits of relevant urban features. The methods were quite advanced, and well informed by our advisory group, but we ran out of time to complete this work --- but I am sure Yang and others would be excited to pull this together for a publication and prototype tool. @eugenrb also mentioned she has colleagues who have been working on similar topics.

AI-assisted audits of urban policies and environments

@gboeing, @carlhiggs and @eugenrb have previously discussed potential projects in this space, and @rschifan was at the time of our meeting at a conference on the use of AI agents and large language models in urban studies. There is shared interest in exploring how generative and other AI models could assist/augment policy and spatial indicator analysis and reporting.

Other notes

AWS funding

I have some funding to use AWS cloud computing resources via RMIT's RACE Hub; this could be useful for example if we want to prototype some kind of online tool (e.g. for stand alone policy report generation). Open to other suggestions of how we could make use of this, particularly if others have thoughts and time to contribute to implementation.